This week's poem, "Ku Li," was begun in China during the second Sino-Japanese War. It's among the last poems by the New Zealand writer, Robin Hyde, completed not long before she committed suicide in London, aged 33, in 1939. It's a remarkable poem to have emerged from a relatively short and certainly perilous period of travel that included a trip to the frontline. Imagine a foreign correspondent currently in the Middle East producing such an empathetic, vivid and polished piece of writing against the pounding of gunfire and the pressure of deadlines.

But Hyde was a remarkably focused writer. Her careers as novelist, campaigning journalist and poet were crammed into a short life beset with personal difficulties, including poor physical and mental health. Born Iris Guiver Wilkinson in Cape Town in 1906, she was taken to Wellington, New Zealand as a baby. Her father worked in the Postal and Telegraph service, and the family's circumstances were modest. Iris was always strongly influenced by her father's leftist values, and, as a young woman, rejected the conventional social boundaries represented by her mother.

Both Hyde's children were born out of wedlock. Her second son, Derek Challis, was to become her biographer, and produced, with Gloria Rawlinson, The Book of Iris: A Biography of Robin Hyde, in 2002. Her first child died at birth. She named him Christopher Robin, and subsequently began writing as Robin Hyde.

She is best-known as a novelist, but poetry was her passion, and her technique continued to evolve to the end. While her early work can seem "Georgian" in tone and colour, she was always a literary explorer: a late poem, "Incidence", for example, is written with a modernist's spatial sense, and provides an instamatic shot of a particular moment. Hyde was clearly set to become a major poet.

Always restless and hungry for experience, she had intended to visit England at the beginning of 1938. After a stopover in Hong Kong, she changed course for Shanghai. The war with Japan had begun and she was to experience many dangers and difficulties, not least a 50-mile walk along a railway line to escape from beleaguered Hsuchow. Her experiences resulted in the prose book Dragon Rampant, besides the series of poems which includes "Ku Li".

"Ku Li" is a representative figure rather than an individual. The two words, as the poem explains, mean "bitter strength" and the Coolie's eternal plight is to be exploited by his masters, and used, virtually, as slave labour. The Hundred Names is a metonymic reference to "the common man."

It seems likely that Hyde knew of Arthur Waley's translations from the Chinese, and perhaps, when the poem describes Ku Li as playing "horse without a bridle" there's an intended echo of Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" ("you came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse"). Ku Li has the powerless status of the child, though he is hardly playing: he "carts a world along, and carts a war."

Margaret Orbell describes finding "a code of alert irony" characteristic of the work of many New Zealand women poets (Ursula Bethell, Fleur Adcock) and this quality seems to inform Hyde's tone, too. She mocks the "sweet-belled idle" and their ignorant racism, but, more importantly, she shows a certain tough humour, as well as anger and compassion, on behalf of Ku Li. He is not aggrandised by the poem, any more than he aggrandises himself ("Not claiming to have died for something's sake") – not, at least, until the end, where water (the river) and fire (glazed tiles) symbolise his unrecognised immortality.

The strong, hard rhymes, sometimes driven across stanzas ("dosed"/ "bossed") and the flexible rhythms give this poem's iambic pentameter a muscular quality, full of action and movement and variation. The verse embodies Ku Li's ceaseless labour and the ruggedness of his landscape. Generous and outward-looking though the vision is, the reader can't help feeling that Hyde is not only paying tribute to the "bitter strength" of the indomitable Chinese peasant, but describing her own heroic quest to write the truth of her country and her self.

Ku Li

Two words from China: 'Ku li' – bitter strength. 'This coolies' war!' tinkle the sweet-belled idle. His face and Hundred Names sweep on below, Child-like, he plays at horse without the bridle: And carts a world along, and carts a war, Tugging perhaps to mountain heights at length: The new vernacular chronicles exhort him, And waste their breath. His grinning face can't know Half the fixed meanings of the flags he saw: He had a happy childhood: then time caught him, Broadened his shoulders, but forbore his head.

Eight years his life between the shafts: eight hours (With luck), between Changsha and Hsuchowfu, Picks swinging like pendulums in a noon of flowers: Shining their freedom, bombers spot his blue, But cease to count. Too poor for marriage-bed He looks for dreaming in the big dim shed, Rolled in the quilt where other warmth has dossed:

Turns to Yunnan, hacks the next strategy through, Cheerful; and often killed; and always bossed. And not on Tiger Head or Purple Mountain His grave-mound rises: worlds live on, to slake Their ashy gullets at his bitter fountain Of blood and vigour. Enemy armies break Somehow on this, as somehow cracks the stone Under his pick: but now he rots alone (Not claiming to have died for something's sake,) Only the earth makes ready for his bone, The green rice sees him with unflattering eyes:

Too cheap a partisan for man to prize, Men seldom know him for their broadest river, And burnt in the immortal tiles forever.